Colleen Purdon has spent 30 years trying to make women and children safer in this community.

She’s a well known local champion of victims of domestic and sexual abuse and her efforts have helped produce real change.

Her 20 years as co-ordinator of the Violence Prevention Grey Bruce Committee will be feted at a retirement party for her in the public health unit main floor boardroom Thursday between 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

That committee is one of 49 across Ontario, each of which includes representatives from the justice, corrections, child welfare, violence against women, education, health and social service sectors.

The committees were created to help ensure agencies know each others’ roles in cases where their clients’ needs overlap.

The 65-year-old retired at the end of September.

But she has some unfinished work, including a project which she hopes she’ll finish by year’s end to update those committee protocols member agencies follow when faced with domestic and sexual abuse, in the wake of the Globe and Mail’s “Unfounded” newspaper series.

As committee co-ordinator, she has identified pressing community issues in domestic abuse – including on elders, and in recent years, addressed racism against members of local Aboriginal communities, as well as sexual abuse in the community.

She’s sought funding and when successful, obtained money to study problems and make recommendations to address the issues which have emerged on the committee.

And Purdon has helped influence provincial policy through her work with the committee.

She helped write a rehabilitative program for men that’s commonly used in Grey County and in other court jurisdictions today.

The First Charge Early Intervention Program takes minor domestic abuse first-offenders who are willing to enter a guilty plea, then undertake counselling in exchange for an absolute or conditional discharge, to help change underlying issues.

Purdon credited Sally Dobson, formerly with probation and parole, for her observation “we can’t solve the problem by just rescuing women,” inspiring the approach.

That program came out of the 1996 killing of Arlene May by her ex-partner Randy Isles, while he was on bail release, which did not require him to surrender his permits to possess firearms. He shot her with a gun he went out and bought, then killed himself. An inquest produced new domestic violence protocols.

The provincial Ministry of the Attorney General took the early intervention idea, which Purdon worked on with Marilyn Struthers, her committee co-ordinator predecessor, and made it a program available provincially.

Another local project Purdon led, No Wrong Door, influenced provincial expectations of agencies that they will use a “trauma- and violence-informed” approach to dealing with people to seek out underlying, complex issues. Understanding a person’s background can help to understand the person’s needs and how to respond better, Purdon said.

Her study, published in 2008, was the first to interview both women with addition, mental health and trauma and the service agencies which responded. She replicated the project to include southwestern Ontario in 2014.

She sees a trauma-informed approach also being adopted in the judicial system, she said, an approach she’s including as part of an updated domestic and sexual assault victim protocol which her committee’s agency representatives will be governed by.

So for example, by signing off on the policy, agencies such as police will commit to considering a person with mental health and addiction issues may also be affected by an unaddressed childhood or ongoing current trauma or abuse, for example.

She trained and worked as a music therapist before coming to Owen Sound in 1986 to be executive director of the Women’s Centre. She was also on the steering committee of the Family Violence Prevention Coalition, the former name of her committee, in those years.

It was her seven years at the Women’s Centre, an emergency shelter for abused women and their children, that her eyes were opened to the degree of abuse hidden in the community, she said.

Things are much different and open today, with women of late tacking “#MeToo,” on their social media posts if they’ve been sexually assaulted in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal, than they were 30 years ago, Purdon said.

Abuse isn’t as hidden today but it’s an ongoing challenge to educate people, she said.

But it’s not like the bad old days.

She remembers going to the Grey County social services committee to ask for a doubling of the rate the county provided for their cramped shelter to extend their stays.

She was floored when told at the committee that that would just encourage women to put their feet up and never leave.

And she recalled when the women’s shelter needed a zoning change to open a shelter in a house by the old OSCVI site downtown which the school board offered. The Women’s Centre had to go to the Ontario Municipal Board to get it done because the county opposed the change, she said. The county is a great partner now, she said.